


Redder than Blood

by RiaTheDreamer



Series: Angst War [4]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Injury, RvB Angst War, Set on Chorus, mentions of grimmons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 15:26:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13999062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiaTheDreamer/pseuds/RiaTheDreamer
Summary: It’s in the aftermath – as colorless as it seems – that Sarge explains the meaning of Red.





	Redder than Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CC_Writes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CC_Writes/gifts).



Their heavy steps broke the silence when the grass was crushed beneath their boots. The field in front of them was dry and yellow and partially wrecked where the wheels of the Warthogs had flattened everything in their path.

Stains of blood could be seen every once in a while, like a macabre red trail leading them in the right direction. Tucker thought it as a very cruel irony.

“This sucks,” he said, knowing it was a very weak description of the situation. But ever since Kimball had delivered the news, he hadn’t been able to find the right words to express his thoughts with.

But the silence had become almost deafening by this point. Just the sound of the constant footsteps as Wash led them forwards while refusing to slow down his pace even further. “I know, Tucker,” he said while staring straight ahead.

Tucker pushed himself forward, dragging his boots against the bloodstained grass.

A sharp inhale of air could be heard from the Freelancer in front of him. “I’m sorry-“

“What the fuck are you apologizing for?”

“You knew them the best.”

He didn’t like the use of past tense. He’d heard such things would be easier to get used to when time had passed. Tucker wasn’t quite sure about that. “Dude, stop that bullshit. We’re all-“

Simultaneously, they both sensed the presence behind them, and they both spun around with their rifle raised. For a brief second they both wished for the enemy to have returned – the need for revenge was bubbling in their veins.

But the soldier that stumbled from the thicket wasn’t a pirate. His armor was blue and it wasn’t bloodstained and he looked at them with a tilted head. “Hello.”

“Caboose,” Tucker said in a half-sigh, half-scolding. “We told you to stay behind!”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did that but then you left. And I think it’d be sad for more people to disappear today so I came so we can all be lost together.”

“We’re not lost, Caboose,” Wash said, softly.

“But,” he smacked his lips, leaning his head left and right, “ _but_ you said you couldn’t bring the Reds back for dinner. And we all know I’m better at hide and seek than you, Agent Washingtub. I can find them for you.”

Tucker stared at him. “We don’t need-“

“There,” he said, pointing with a blue hand, “I found one.”

They both turned around to follow his finger, and the dread had already begun to set in their stomach.

Caboose let out a thoughtful hum. “Light-ish red does not make good camouflage…”

“Caboose,” Wash said, not moving his glance away from the pink heap in the distance. His mouth felt dry. “Please go search somewhere else.”

“Did I win?”

“Yes, Caboose,” Tucker said so that the blue soldier would nod his head and do what he was told, turning away from them to walk alongside the thicket instead.

The others walked over to his find, the bottom of their boots becoming progressively more bloodstained the closer they came to the body.

“Shit,” Tucker said, feeling nauseous. He looked away, focusing on the sky instead. Anything but the red.

When he finally moved his head downwards, he focused on the broken body of Lopez that was lying next to the charred pink armor. The head had been separated, once again, but this time no monotone voice emerged from the cracked visor – only a few sparks until they, too, died.

Wash was crouching as he placed his fingers next to the entry wound. “Gunshot wound to the chest,” he said, calmly, like echoes of the past weren’t creeping up on him. “Then grenade fragments. Possibly self-inflicted – the grenade dropped by accident when the bullet hit-“

“Stop that,” Tucker said. He was still staring at the head of the robot.

The Freelancer didn’t respond, just turning his head to await an explanation.

So Tucker continued, “Stop talking like a fucking autopsy report.”

“It’s necessary intel-“

“The only thing we need to know is which fuckers did this and where we can find them!”

“I found Gruf and Simon!” Caboose called out further ahead. He’s waving at them, and Tucker and Wash shared a glance through darkened visors before leaving the bloody scene to move on to the next.

Tucker picked up Lopez’ head, gripping it tightly, shaking it once but receiving no response. There were a lot of wires crawling through cracks in the metal, and Tucker’s hands were covered in oil.

“They’re sleeping,” Caboose warned them in hushed voice when they came close enough to see what he was pointing at.

The heap was orange and maroon, limbs were intertwined, bodies shielding each other fruitlessly, blood mixed.

Wash had just taken a step forward when Caboose’s hand landed heavily on his shoulder. “I don’t think you should wake them up,” he said, very gravely, and Tucker wondered if he _knew_. Still, he had to plan for the talk he was inevitably going to have with Caboose later.

Wash gathered the dog tags, placing them carefully in his pocket compartment.

Tucker carried Lopez’ head, like he’d done before in the past, and for a brief second he could almost pretend that things hadn’t changed.

* * *

Carolina didn’t think she was the right person for the job. But Wash had insisted.

“I… never understood the Reds,” he’d said, wringing his hands now when they were no longer holding the dog tags. The shadows on his face made him look exhausted as he’d continued in a sigh, “But I wish I’d had the time to understand.”

“I can’t claim to understand, either,” she’d said, voice hoarse, because the world had made very little sense that day, too much unfairness to accept.

“He shouldn’t receive these from me. I- don’t think he needs this from a Blue.”

“There is no war between you anymore,” she’d reminded him. Days of fighting for a specifically colored flag were long gone – replaced with days where you fought to survive, to save a planet. They were one big team now which had been proven when Rebels and Feds joined forces and – even more shockingly – Sarge had gone on missions with Tucker.

But Wash had shaken his head, almost sadly. “This is Sarge. I don’t think we need to break his world any further.”

When he’d left, disappearing down the hallway like a shadow, Epsilon had appeared on her shoulder.

“Do you think I can do this?” she’d asked.

He’d shrugged, a holographic hand giving her a comforting pat. “I don’t think you can make things worse, so why not give it a go.”

He’d flickered out of the existence then, agreeing with Wash. No Blues should be there for this.

So Carolina had closed her fingers around the dog tags, all four of them, and had headed towards the hospital room where Sarge was, silently, waiting for news.

Doctor Grey met her in the doorway, and for a moment she thought she would take the heavy burden from her hands, but the doctor just sent her a small smile that didn’t match the shining brims in her eyes.

“Good timing,” she praised her, voice as cheerful as ever but with a fragile edge to it, like trying to keep up a façade after too many sleepless nights. Carolina knew that feeling. “He’s awake and coherent again. Despite what he might try to tell you.”

Sarge was staring straight at her the moment she walked through the doorway. His torso was wrapped with bandages. His leg was in a splint.

He’d been half-unconscious when one of the Rebels – orange trims, from Grif’s team, she remembered – had hauled him inside a Warthog. When they’d arrived, he’d been unconscious. But when he woke he’d told them what had happened, verifying the bad news the few surviving soldiers had described in their reports.

No one had seen the ambush coming. Carolina wondered if things had changed if she’d gone with them. She wasn’t a Red, but Blue Team had Wash to lead the charge in case things went south. Red Team had-

She stared back at Sarge. “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out a hand to place the dog tags against the bed table. The metal clanked against the surface.

Sarge’s grey eyes were piercing but calm. It occurred to her how rare it was for him to be outside his armor. But he wasn’t far from the image she had of him. Silver-stained hair, gruffy beard, old scars etched deep into his skin, furrows of exhaustion now more evident than ever.

“I see.” His voice was levelled, bandaged hands folded on top of the white blanket. He was staring at her, eyes leaving the dog tags. “Oh well. Not much of a surprise.  The fatass trips and breaks his leg, big drama queen. Simmons of course wouldn’t leave him – boy wasn’t that smart in the end. And Donut-“ He inhaled, tilting his head. “Idiots. All of them. I suppose you’ve already found replacements?”

Carolina searched for her voice. She hadn’t expected Sarge to break down – because the image was too strange for her brain to conjure up. Sarge was stoic and gruff – those were his traits, firm and unchangeable, and the sense of normality had always been like a calm hand on her shoulder, telling her that today was like the days before, that no crisis had hit them hard enough to break them yet. It was the small things, she understood now, like Grif’s ironic comments, Simmons’ voice breaking in annoyance, Donut’s innuendoes, Lopez’ telling glare through the visor.

Pieces of her new life gone, crumbling. Time to hold on to what remained.

Let the old man grieve, a mental voice told her. It sounded a bit like Epsilon – despite him being nowhere near her implants – and a bit like her mother as well. She listened to it, continuing, “Tucker and Caboose will be in charge of red and go- _or_ _ange_ team for now. Kimball is planning a memorial service. Their sacrifices won’t be forgotten.”

Sarge let out a thoughtful hum. “Give me a few days and I’ll get the armory up and running again. Broken knee hasn’t stopped me before. Broken fingers are the real nuisance – you ain’t a real man without yer happy trigger finger.”

She didn’t understand. She bit her lip, staring at him. Relieved that he wasn’t crying, worried that he wasn’t crying.

Sarge’s expression was stoic. There was a ghost of a small, proud smile on his lips. “Don’t you worry,” he promised her. “Red Team isn’t dead yet.”

He was right.

There was one member left, who seemed unfaced by the fact.

A part of Carolina found comfort in this. The other part wondered if this wasn’t the problem they’d be forced to deal with:

Sarge was the only one left.

* * *

The ceremony was quick. Kimball had feared that the pirates would see the event as an opportunity to strike again, another painful blow, in the middle of their grief.

But the bowed heads during Kimball’s brief speech said enough. Doyle also offered some words, mostly about Donut and Lopez, seeing how the Captains had mainly been the Rebels’ heroes.

But Rebel and Fed alike honored them with their silence. There was a soft sound of crying, mainly from the first row where the Lieutenants were standing with their hands raised in a salute.

Caboose and Tucker, Epsilon on his shoulder, were standing the closest to the caskets, then came the Freelancers. After a brief vote, it’d been decided to let Grif and Simmons share a grave. They all thought it fitting. They had given Lopez’ remaining pieces a casket as well, as strange as the gesture might be, but he’d been a soldier deserving of just as much honor as the rest. Grey had worked on him for a while but it’d been made clear that the primary storage unit had been damaged beyond repair. For all Carolina knew, then it meant the soul was gone – to be buried with the rest.

But the head of the robot had been missing, being grabbed by Sarge when no one had been watching, and no one had the heart to take it from him.

Once Carolina had been sure that Sarge would crawl from the hospital to hold a final speech for his fallen soldiers. Now, she understood that she didn’t know him – or understood him. But grief didn’t make sense, she supposed.

Sarge’s absence did not go unnoticed though no one commented on it. To leave him be was the most common advice these days. Let him grieve in his own pace.

The Sergeant had always been far away from their grasp of understanding. The way he forced himself forward, his manner of speaking and acting – the experience of Sarge was baffling. He was a man that couldn’t be understood.

Carolina wondered if the Reds had understood him, if there had been nuances too delicate for the rest of the world to pick up on. Donut’s wine and cheese hours, Grif’s ability to nap while standing, Simmons’ random ‘fun’ facts, Lopez’ surprising loyalty-

It was a mixture of bad habits and unspoken childhood traumas and character traits too dominant to be hidden, Grif and Simmons bickering in the corner of the room, Donut’s laughter bouncing off the walls, Lopez’ foreign threats and the proud gleam in Sarge’s eyes. The absurd and the laughable and the incomprehensible stuffed together into a base painted red where it’d been accepted, turned into the daily life, to be admired and laughed at and judged by the rest of the world.

She thought for a moment that she saw Sarge watching from the back row, the furthest away from the caskets. A red blur catching her eye momentarily. But she wasn’t sure.

Red was a rare color to find these days.

* * *

“I don’t understand,” she’d said.

“It’s Sarge,” Epsilon had reminded her, “No one understands him.”

He’d been discharged from the hospital, despite Grey’s worried hovering, and now he was roaming around the headquarters, leg still too busted to let him go along on missions. And now he had no men to command around.

Let the man grieve, the voice in her head said again, and Epsilon echoed its words. “What can I say,” he’d shrugged. “Sarge is a strange man. Chances are he expresses himself in some very strange ways. Let’s just be glad he hasn’t snuck out on a suicide mission yet.”

Let the man grieve.

But sometimes, people needed company in their grief.

She found him in the armory, resting on a stool. His crutches were leaning against the counter. His bandaged hand was holding Lopez’ broken head, the other a screwdriver.

She approached him slowly, listening to him talk to himself. His voice bounced against the metal walls, making it sound hollow.

“-and so you plug the wire there – and then you pull it out so it won’t expect it – and then stuff it in the whasawhat like a turkey on Thanksgiving. Hmmm. What’s that? Do I smell… Grif, how will you explain the suspicious lack of coconut in the air? Why is this oil so black? Is this… Oily oil? Grif, are you trying to kill the planet?! We abandoned that idea years ago. I specifically asked for oil – the coconut kind. We’ll use the leftovers for the stabbed produce we’ll eating tonight. How do you excuse your waste of resources? Explain yourself, numbnuts!”

“Sarge,” she said, and he looked up at her, a nod revealing that he’d acknowledged her presence. He’d fallen silent, saying nothing even when Carolina dragged out a crate so she could sit down in front of him, meeting his stare.

His eyes were red. Bloodshot.

“I am a very old man,” he finally told her, using the same clarified voice as when she’d brought him the dog tags. They were hanging around his neck now, she realized, kept together in a thick chain.

He was bowed over, as if his defeated posture could testify his words, but Carolina lowered her head so they could regain eye-contact. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

There was a knowing look in his eyes, tired but grateful. “Too old for this,” he elaborated.

Carolina knew he wasn’t talking about the war.

“They died as heroes,” she told him, again. She wondered how many times people had repeated those words to him.

“That they did.” He was smiling against, just the slightest twitch in the wrinkles around the corner of his mouth. “Loyal men fighting against the Blue to the end.”

“This.” She swallowed the spit in her mouth. “Sarge, this wasn’t- _isn’t_ a war against the Blues.”

“Sure it is. Always have been.” He raised his head, looking straight at her, unflinching. “And always will be. First paragraph of the Red Team Handbook.”

But she shook her head. She remembered the time when she’d met the Sim Troopers, when she’d quickly learned that the Reds lived in their own little world with their own understanding of reality. At least, such was the way when it came to Sarge. She’d looked down at him back then, snorted at his insanity. Now, she wondered, if his world was more comforting than hers.

“There is no red versus blue,” she told him. “We’re together in this.” Because if they color-coded this, it’d be blue and it’d be red, and the new cruel reality was that Sarge was the only Red left. He’d be alone.

Sarge blinked. His eyes were blank. “So you are telling me,” he began, slowly, voice hoarse, “there is no universal divine power manifested in the color Red that makes up half of the balance in the world? That there is no such sort of power to flow between humans and tie the honorable souls together in a high-spirited, fist-throwing, victory-bound group called _Red Team_ , the greatest and reddest of teams? That there are no reasons but the despicableness of twisted men’s paperwork to explain why my boys ended up in my Gulch? That they were left behind to die in a war that wasn’t theirs – not that they followed the path of a Red, dying honorable with their weapons raised and a gleam in their eyes, fighting for what they believed in: Red Team.”

When Sarge held his speeches, they could all hear that _Red_ was with a capital letter.

Carolina focused on that, the power in the word, and they both pretended not to see the tears running down his scarred cheeks. There’d been talk among the soldiers, among those left behind, fearful and curious whispering about when Sarge would break, how the scene would look like.

Now Carolina realized that none of them would see him break. He was already broken. It’d happened before they patched him up, before they gave him their condolences and supportive, meaningless words of comfort.

Sarge had broken on the battle field that day, when he’d been dragged away from his dying men.

 “No,” she said, lowering her head. “You’re right.”

Sarge huffed. It sounded wet.

“Damn right I am.”

* * *

Later, when the bone and skin had healed – some things could never heal – Sarge would march into the fight with his shotgun, ready to go down fighting. Grey had gently asked for him not to ruin her handiwork, but she’d let him go.

They all had.

Even later, when Epsilon was gone and Carolina was searching for a voice inside her head, she realized she understood Sarge perfectly.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt by Chaos-Child: “Sarge: A father should not outlive his sons. They don't have to all die at once, the when and how is all up to you, all that matters is that in the end the only one that survives is Sarge.”
> 
> You know what I struggle to write – emotional Sarge. I swear to god, writing this almost killed me but now I’m done and I’m quite happy with the results!
> 
> I hope you like it, Chaos-Child! I know I never had Sarge say the direct words out loud, but the meaning should be there, hidden behind his other words.
> 
> And I start the angst war by killing (almost) everybody. We’re off to a good start.
> 
> As always: English isn’t my native language and you can find me as riathedreamer on tumblr.


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